UCISA CISG Stuff

Lean is all about simplest, smoothest process – dropping waste, doing things efficiently and quickly.  It’s unfriendly towards committees, think-tanks etc and is all about doing things rather than talking about them.    On the downside it feels like it’s all rather obvious and old-hat but on the plus side – as a methodology that suggests it might be a really comfortable fit for us…

Example given of process for a student getting a confirmation letter.  7-10 days for the student and 30 mins of staff time for each letter.  I’m very glad we’ve got that one licked by comparison.   Basic task of making the project Lean seems pretty intuitive -

• analyse the current process
• review the process
• consider options for new process
• design new process
• put together plan to implement
• implement.

Important to have all of the relevant people involved.  Process likely to devastate a whole herds of sticky-notes….

John Paschoud and Luke Taylor presenting on behalf of LSE and University of Bristol repsectively.

IdM is a key issue for many institutions (ourselves included) and having an infoKit will be really rather handy.  It’s not there yet but is currently well down the road of productions schedule.  A show of hands indicates 80-90% of those present believe IdM to be currently a hot topic for their institution.

Some of the problems with putting together IdM business case:

• Hard to explain
• Middleware is difficult to make a case for.  Up-front apps are much easier.

LSE noted as not having a clear policy on when/how someone becomes or ceases to be a member of their university.  Policy vacuum almost certainly not their problem alone.

JISC infoKit to be released March 2010 and to contain:

• Definitions of terminology and concepts
• Service Usage Models and how those work for other e-Framework elements.
• Governance and policy guidance
• Guidance and templates for audit
• Requirements spec guide
• Gap analysis guide
• Business case guide
• Roadmap for Universities / Colleges
• Guide to system solutions

Bristol have been road-testing the infoKit.  Their situation seems roughly the same as our own – some decent practice/policy with significant gaps.  Luke indicates that smartcard implementation is made harder for lack of having resolved IdM issues.  Bristol’s road to IdM:

• Establish governance
• Define policies
• Identify process owners and streamline processes associated with IdM
• Choose and implement technology

Never likely to be a popular topic…. especially for a Friday morning. A process that’s well known to be all pain and no gain introduced to tired and hung-over delegates.  The reasons given for the process are the usual ones – bogus colleges etc

Number of institutions registered much smaller than the number that used to bring in overseas students.  However, nothing in the data to indicate whether that is bogus institutions dropping out or just those for whom the admin overhead isn’t too much to make it worthwhile.

Transition exercise is pushed and takeup seems to be sparse (only one hand in the room) possibly due to the audience not being heavily involved with the process at their institution rather than institutions not having been through the exercise (apparently over 500 have).

Lots of details about process, timing, reporting duties etc.  I won’t repeat them here as there was nothing surprising and I very much expect that everyone who needs to know already does.  The news that most folks might yet to hear is that there’s a revised XSD to be released shortly (perhaps even today)  – sponsors will be informed.

UKBA have been wielding the ban-hammer on sponsors via their audit process.  They note that institutions are responsible for the actions of their agents and that dodgy agents will result in suspension/withdrawal of the system from institutions.

Controversially UKBA indicate they might introduce mandatory English language testing for potential students.  I fear that if we applied that to home students we might have difficulties filling places…

Prepayment is now going to be available but only on the basis that any leftover money at the end of the year is scooped up by UKBA.  Batch payments will be available from the start for up to 1001 CAS at a time.

Fraser Muir from Queen Margarets took us on their journey from blank slate to their new campus and in particular – the wonders they’ve managed with smarcards.

Many institutions have used smartcards for ID or printer credit or access control or cashless purchasing or car-park provisioning but QMU have done the lot – well, more or less… cashless purchasing still to be fully sorted but almost there, we’re promised.  Admittedly they have been aided by being able to start from scratch but they’ve had some hard setbacks too – including their vendor going into administration (and subsequenly being bought out).  The benefits seem quite immense – significant efficiency gains and a wealth of management information (attendence monitoring for a start) being just two.

I would very much love to emulate their success but… CMS and service desk first.  If I keep telling myself that I’m sure I’ll get them both signed off quicker…

If there’s one thing this talk, from Stuart Bolton (Consultant) and Richard Rankin (Queens Unviersity, Belfast) brought to the fore it’s quite how important it is to get systems talking to one another. REF draws from HR, research and specialist data and requires that data to be of good quality and capable of being cross-linked in a reliable manner.

Here, as with so many similar situations, preparedness is key. If you have data in ship-shape order and with common coding across the board life should be a lot easier than otherwise.

Queens seem to have the situation licked and are even in a position to repurpose the data, via their CMS and Sharepoint, into information sources for senior management, research staff and for providing academic CVs. All marvellous stuff.

And the lessons learned here can be carried across to non-research areas as well. Get your data sorted and you can make a lot of it. Leave it in a mess and it’s no use to anyone.

Lucy Burrow from Kings College, London gave a sterling presentation reminding us quite how important our relationships with vendors and other third parties are.

For most of us Vendor Management isn’t really a discipline in itself and maybe it should be. We tend to pootle along praising, scolding and begging our vendors as and when necessary and could certainly benefit form a more robust and systematic approach.

Where to start? Lucy suggests that consistency is key as is a clear idea of what you want out of the relationship. As she indicated, that needs to start right from the outset as it’s not easy bringing a relationship round when it’s gone in a direction that you don’t like.

OK – an attempt here to summarise some of the Web 2.0 stuff from the Birds of a Feather session.  I know I’ll have missed some of it so please feel free to add to the comments if you can think of anything

What is Web 2.0?

There seemed to be a consensus of opinion here that it is pretty much ‘that which is beyond the VLE’.  Primarily the collaborative tools out there in clouds – including but not limited to:

• Blogs
• Wikis
• Social networks
• You Tube
• Flickr
• …and so on…

There was defnitely a consensus that you could have ‘owned’ Web 2.0 technologies and so hosting your own blogs, wikis etc counted as Web 2.0.

Right – sorry to belabour that somewhat basic point but it probably has baring on some of the later points…

Conflict #1 – control vs freedom

One of the definining features of the Web 2.0 world is freedom – the freedom to choose one app over another, to grab what works for you and to grab something else when your needs change.  This is all very well but it does lack consistency and control.  If you have 100 academics using 300 tools between them then how can you support that…. and how can a student remember their details on all of those different sites?  Most people seem keen to solve this problem by introducing ‘preferred’ or ’supported’ Web 2.0 tools that they will push to their staff in favour of others that can’t be as readily supported.   This would seem to harness the middle ground, not prohibiting other tools but offering the carrot of support to those staff who fall in with the party line…

Of course – life would be easier if the major Web 2.0 players could adopt some degree of uniforimity in access APIs (OpenID etc) and in terms and conditions.  This might well be an area where UCISA and similar bodies can push a UK HE agenda to the majore players.

Legalities

One of the issues that, understandably, worries a lot of folks are the legal implications of using Web 2.0 technology – particularly out in the cloud.  It was noted that one UK Academic has already been successfully sued for comments placed on a forum he controlled (not placed by him).  In this area, JISClegal already have a host of information and are rapdily growing the area.  Their pages can be found at: http://www.jisclegal.ac.uk/Themes/Web20.aspx

The key point here is that staff and students need to be educated in the legal and social aspects of Web 2.0 technology as well as in the technical aspects.  Can we leave it up to them to figure out?  Only at our peril.

Non-academic/social use

Some discussion was had about use of Web 2.0 apps in non-academic and non-social situations and Huddersfield’s library was brought to our attention where they have a number of Amazon-inspired Web 2.0 features including “people who borrowed this also borrowed…”.  In addition to that a number of institutions were using collabourative tools to help form policies and documents, especially wikis and blogs.  Blogs were also used by some institutions as a communications stream between staff.   And, of course, for disseminating conference information

The group thought this was an area where the technology might be more heavily leveraged but that non-academic staff were generally more liable to follow senior management trends than their academic counterparts and that progress was likely to be quicker if senior managers could be persuaded to use the technologies.  And so we’re back to senior managers blogging – I must try and find some champions when I get back to the office.  I’m sure I can persuade one or two to give it a whirl.

Visibility

In addition to senior management buy-in it was thought that visibility for Web 2.0 tools could be greatly enhanced by tying them in with key systems such as SRS, VLE and Library systems.

The Future

It seems that most people are still trying to work out quite what their Web 2.0 strategies should be (or even whether they should have one or roll it into eLearning strategy) and that that is the immediate future for them.  For the majority of those present at the sessions, a limited product set of ’supported’ platforms was in the near future with a number wondering if Web 2.0 technologies might be an answer to expensive VLE licensing.  That, though depends on having tools to pull the product sets together, adequate legal frameworks and some consistent approach to single-sign on across the toolset.  Hopefully UCISA and similar bodies will be able to help with some of those.

Where are we now?

The session starts with the above question.  It seems that HE, or at least that represented here, that Web 2.0 is still sparsely used but there are islands of enthusiasm in quite diverse areas.  Cloud is still very among the least used aspects of Web 2.0.  Social networking seems to be a key, if under-exploited area.  Web 2.0 style communication tools seems to be seeping into more traditional systems such as library, student records etc.

Visibility is low where Web 2.0 tools are not linked to existing institutional toolsets.  Not many people, and none represented, have Web 2.0 strategies at their institution.  A more common scenario is to enfold Web 2.0 strategy into eLearning strategy although, even there, take-up is sparse.

It seems common that enthusiastic academics are leading the field using Web 2.0 tools they are fond of.  This leads to a massive diversity of systems with issues of single sign-on, support etc.

What expectation do student have of Web 2.0?  Are the academics (and other staff) capable of delivering on those expectations?  What aspects of Web 2.0 should the institution support – social as well as professional/educational?  And – what is cost effective?

Dad in the disco scenario suggests that students want separate social and academic spaces.  So- is there any point having institutional social spaces?  Some success has been had with ’seeding’ spaces with students.

Dissonance between take-up of Web 2.0 from one academic to another can lead to dissatisfaction from students with complaints that academics are not engaging enough.

Huddersfield University are incorporating ideas from Amazon into their Library system: “people who borrowed this book also borrowed” .  Others use wikis for collaboration amongst administrative teams.

It seems that the profile of administrative / support departments is to wait for central approval from senior management.  Can senior management be encouraged to use Web 2.0 tools and set an example?  Senior managers blogging is still something that really sticks prior to making its way into my mind.  But it seems like a big win in terms of both communication and empathy-building if it can be achieved.

Session 2

Everywhere seems to be patchy in takeup of web 2.0 with work being carried out in absence of strategy rather than guided by it.   Where there is strategy it seems to be vague and nebulous.  Local champions seem to occupy all spaces in the institutions but cluster in IT, library and academic areas.

Of interest – it’s easier to control/police when Web 2.0 provided by the institution.

One option – a set of preferred external services.  An interesting dissonance emerging between control and limited toolsets and consistency vs diversity, freedom and lack of control.

If we don’t provide, the cloud will and we will lose control and consistency anyway… Student experience must be one of the big driving factors…  Single identity, if not single sign-on is a big driving factor for consistency.

Will Web 2.0 do away with the VLE?  How do we control the bits that matter – for instance with work completed online in Web 2.0 apps.  Can we mitigate risk without that control?  For instance, assessed blog posts and liability as owners of blogs.  The cloud is never going to submit to such controls as the userbase move to freer systems…

JANET are enthusiastic to let institutions decide what is and isn’t appropriate as educationally useful rather than to centralise some idea of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ content.

Strategic ambitions seem to be to catch up, embracing some aspects of Web 2.0 technologies and limiting the field somewhat to provide consistency and supportability – adding formally supported (preferred?) systems.  A framework for security would be useful – defining some aspect of response to legal action and the like with the big suppliers.  Is this something that UCISA should look into?  Can JISC Legal tell us where we stand with the various major web 2.0 providers currently?

Steve Bailey from JISC Infonet up to discuss strategy.

Steve defines strategy as basically – working out your goals, making plans to achieve those goals and then assessing whether those goals have been reached via those plans.

Framework focuses on Mission, Vision and Values and using those to form 3-5 year strategic plan with KPIs, and various information sources and channels supporting that.

Common Problems

Do staff have any idea what Mission Statement etc are for the institution?  I’m pretty sure I was on our steering group for mission statement and I can’t remember it for the life of me…

An interesting game – grab a dozen mission statements from different institutions and see if people can match them to the institution…  Sounds like a laugh

Steve also notes dissonance between high-level strategy and general practice as well as staff disengagement due to the silo effect – with only IT folk being interested in IT strategy etc…  Again – not something that is unfamiliar to us.

KPIs seem to be designed around easy data rather than meaningful data.  Phew.. there’s one we’ve not fallen afoul of but mainly through a lack of KPIs rather than having really good ones…

The main headlines for issues:

• Lack of Responsiveness.
• Words Not Deeds.
• Lack of Staff Engagement
• er… missed this one

New JISC Strategy infoKit launched today!  http://www.jiscinfonet.ac.uk/InfoKits/strategy

A very snazzy interconnected cogs metaphor used..  I’m not going to blog details – it’s all up there at the above link…

The Strategic Conversation

One aspect valued by the infoKit is the idea of open discussion of the strategic thinking – finding out whether the rest of the institution thinks the same about strategic direction as senior management team.  Also noted that blogs from senior management would help frame context.  I’m trying to imagine our senior management team blogging… can’t quite fit the concept in my head.

Fancy Strategy-Bashing With JISC?

If so they have a pilot for the infoKit running next year (from January onwards).

This morning’s first session – not one I can claim as being close to my heart. From a pre-talk basis the Greet IT agenda seems both obvious and easy. But I guess I may be oversimplifying things…

So – Rob Bristow from JISC at the podium…

Rob presents a number of tips for green IT, all of which YorkSJ is already following (phew!).  I thought we had a reasonable handle on it but was starting to doubt a little.  Sorry – would post the 10 tips but they weren’t on screen quite long enough and I don’t want to post them in part.

The message seems to be a holistic and strategic approach.  I’m not sure that YSJ can claim that but a bottom-up approach seems to have got us to roughly the same place.

And – UK HE can be an exemplar – partly due to its similarity to other sectors in terms of their IT profile – at least with regard the ability to greenify it.

Oooh – Rob not a fan of Second Life Boo!  And repeating the oft-disproven Brazillian vs Secondlifer carbon footprint….  I will link the rather robust refutation of the notion as soon as I hunt it down… for now – here’s a Linden Lab article on ‘greening’ secondlife: https://blogs.secondlife.com/community/technology/blog/2009/05/14/the-greening-of-second-life

More of what, I suspect, most of HE has done: multi-function, pooled printer devices, automatic powerdown of PCs, energy efficient equipment etc etc.

Ah.. interesting – taking a look at whether the cloud is environmentally efficient/friendly.  No data yet but later in the year…

Queen Margaret’s new campus toted as an exemplar – I couldn’t agree more…. if you get chance to visit QM then do – they’re a wonder to behold

e-Procurement (and other paperless business systems) is one area where I feel we could make serious improvements back at home… not at easy prospect and one with a lot of internal resistance but, possibly, a big win from economic and efficiency gains as well as ecological ones.  I suspect most institutions are in a similar place to us there…